Taking a ‘giant leap’ for commercial spaceflight, the crew of the Polaris Dawn mission conducted the world’s first private ...

Nelson said lessons learned from NASA's two space shuttle accidents played a role ... Last year, the Russian Space Agency had to rush up a replacement Soyuz capsule for three men whose original ...

In 2011, the Space Shuttle made its last flight without any replacement to transport astronauts between the ISS and Earth. That was in part driven by the cancellation of the Constellation Program ...

Last year, the Russian Space Agency had to rush up a replacement Soyuz capsule for ... Columbia disaster still fresh in many minds — the shuttle broke apart during reentry in 2003, killing ...

The crew planned to return home in mid-March aboard the space shuttle Atlantis ... Soyuz capsule unsafe to return to Earth, requiring a replacement ship to be launched to bring them home.

Over the decades, it has become a common practice for crew to return to Earth in a different spacecraft than the one that took them to space.